Archive for Books

On my goals list for 2013 was to write an eBook of some sort. When I was approached to join some other Backbone.js contributors in a “book sprint” to write a book on developing a Backbone.js application, I happily accepted!

The process went fairly smoothly (all things considered, when 5 people all write a book at once, mostly over a weekend). There were some challenges with timezones and schedules, but overall the team did a great job getting it done.

We started by building our sample project, Hubbub (a GitHub Issues tracker in a Kanban format), upon which we’d base the book. We wanted to build an app that was more complex / real-world than the typical localstorage Todo list example apps out there. You can see the final project live here.

I was given another book to review, called “jQuery 1.3 with PHP”, so here it is. The book is aimed at beginners or intermediate developers wanting to learn how to “enhance your PHP applications by increasing their responsiveness through jQuery and its plugins“.

I was given a copy of a book called “Magento: Beginner’s Guide” to review, so here goes. Overall, the book does a good job of giving a high-level walkthrough of all the different aspects of running a store with Magento.